As Richard P. Feynman said in his talk, presented by to the American Physical Society in Pasadena on December 1959, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom”. This historical lection explored the immense possibilities afforded by miniaturization and started the epoch of nanotechnology. 

The visual images of this project were created using a scanning electron microscope. This is how a microscope sees the world “at the bottom.” The size of the objects depicted in the photographs ranges from several nanometers to hundreds of micrometers. Lifeless space, strange lighting. And suddenly the viewer’s imagination recognizes something familiar... No, it just seemed like it.
Even in antiquity, the idea of the similarity of microcosm and macrocosm was expressed. Pythagoras, Plato, and later Leonardo da Vinci thought about how the part reflects the whole and vice versa.
It is a very tempting prospect to see and believe in direct analogies and simple connections.
But these photographs have a special look - it is not very similar to our human vision. The microscope chamber is dark. The source of “light” - an electron beam - interacts with the surface of the material, the detector registers secondary electrons. One-eyed vision deceives us when perceiving space. What appears to be convex may turn out to be a depression, and vice versa.
At the same time, it looks so much like an ordinary black and white photograph. If you remove the scale markers, it will be difficult to determine the size of objects. Maybe it's a modern sculpture, or maybe it's pictures of planets and galaxies.

I express my gratitude to the Engineering Center of the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology for the opportunity to use the Tescan Vega 3 electron microscope.